Friday 30 October 2009 20.06 EDT
First published on Friday 30 October 2009 20.06 EDT

All my life, I have been a celebrant of Halloween. For me, it is the most important day of the year, the turning point in the old pagan calendar. It is a time for reflection, for taking a moment to confer with my personal ghosts – as far away as I can take myself from glow-in-the-dark plastic skeletons. It's also a time for stories, for retelling the old and beginning the new. As an author, the stories I tell are about our deepest superstitions (the devil peering out from a dark mirror at midnight, say, or the dark energies hidden in the land around us), so I take myself away to haunted places – places such as subarctic Norway. It first captivated me in the mid 90s, and has drawn me back ever since to linger in the darkness and the quiet, and to find the spectral figures – real and imagined – who move through my stories. Figures like the huldra, a troll-like creature from local folklore who appears in the form of an unbearably beautiful young woman and lures men to their doom, or the haunted old storyteller in my current novel-in-progress, a man named Kyrre Ericson, who sees what nobody else does.

Nowhere is more inspiring to me than this northern corner of Scandinavia, and nowhere is better to escape the fake blood and synthetic terrors of commercial Halloween than the ghostly fishing towns and eerie white beaches of Andøya, an island in Norway's Vesterålen region, at the western and most exposed edge of a long, scattered archipelago extending from the Lofotens in the south to the city-island of Tromsø further north.

Eerie, spooky, haunted ... these are not the usual words that spring to mind when describing a coastal resort; but then, the wide, ash-white reach of shoreline at the village of Bleik is no ordinary beach. At around 3km, it is Norway's longest and, situated as it is between a dark, ice-cold sea and damp, shadowy marshland, it really is the stuff, not only of ghost stories, but of the pagan awe that inspired old-time fishermen to tell tales that still scare me. Bleik – Norwegian for "white" or "pale" – is a haunted spot even on summer nights, when midnattsol turns the white sand into a scene from a Munch painting, but it is at its eerie best when the winter darkness falls. It is a perfect place to go walking in the moonlight, under the bright subarctic stars, listening for the voices of dead sailors drifting along the coast from the old whaling stations at the town of Andenes, a couple of miles up the coast, or the sea-trows (trolls) and wights (wraiths) who lie hidden between the wind-bleached fish huts, further up the shore. Out here, in the in-between world, where the cat from the village comes to hunt shore birds among the reeds, the mind quickly learns to doubt the things it usually takes for granted. Half an hour on Bleikstranda after dark is enough to transform the most rational creature into a superstitious wreck.

The old whalers are gone now, but their troubled spirits remain in Andenes, in the historical museum by the old lighthouse, a testament to what was once a prosperous whale-rendering centre, before it was destroyed by local fishermen in the early years of the last century. Those spirits are revealed in the collection of austere, white life-masks – made as part of a community art project in the 1990s, one moulded from the face of each townsperson – displayed at Hisnakul, the town's small-scale but wonderfully quirky cultural centre. In Hisnakul's dim light, this exhibit is a reminder, not only of the unique qualities of its subjects, but also of their mortality. Yet there is nothing morbid in this, just as there is nothing morbid in the stories people tell hereabouts. On the contrary: everything on this chill, white margin of Europe suggests vivid life, the northern mind's longing for light and colour, and its instinctive appreciation of a perishable materiality.

Andøya is in a different world, set at the northern edge of Europe in what seems to be a time and weather of its own. The town boasts several good guesthouses and a modern hotel, the Norlandia Andrikken (00 47 76 14 12 22); like many hotels in the Arctic Circle, its exterior is unashamedly functional, but the microcosm within is warm and pleasant. My own preference is for the fishermen's cottages, or rørbu, that sit almost directly on the water, such as the modern and spacious Norlandia Bleik Apartments, from whose balconies you can step directly on to Bleikstranda of an evening to wander with the ghosts – or, if you prefer, to go whale watching at the Hvalsenter (whalesafari.no), one of the foremost whale-watching spots in Europe, or spot white-tailed eagles fishing just offshore. Not that it really matters which you choose: everything here is decidedly, and reassuringly, eerie. From the simple, wind-bleached huts along the shore to those intimations of the supernatural you find everywhere – the pale ghosts on the moonlit strand, the eagles calling over the water – it's soon difficult to tell where the material ends and where the spectral begins, or even whether there is any difference at all.

• For more information, go to andoyturist.no. Norwegian Air Shuttle (+47 21 49 00 15) flies to Tromso from Gatwick from around £150 rtn. Domestic flights (30mins) from Tromso to Andøya airport in Andenes cost from around NOK490 (£52) rtn, with Wideroe (+47 75 51 35 00). Waking Up In Toytown, John Burnside's sequel to his award-winning memoir A Lie About My Father, will be published by Jonathan Cape on 7 Jan 2010, £16.99.